


it's true, romance is dead (i shot it in the chest then in the head)

by shcherbatskayas



Category: New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Alternate Universe - Normal High School, Denial of Feelings, M/M, Songfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-27
Updated: 2017-11-27
Packaged: 2019-02-07 09:32:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12838344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shcherbatskayas/pseuds/shcherbatskayas
Summary: Saihara, on his first day, realizes that he hates a lot of things about high school.Amami Rantaro is one of them.





	it's true, romance is dead (i shot it in the chest then in the head)

**Author's Note:**

> i was listening to "the music or the misery" by fall out boy and the line "it's true, romance is dead, i shot it in the chest then in the head" gave me amasai feelings, and i loved saihara's suspicion of amami in chapter one, so i put them in a high school au (japanese school years start in april apparently, fun fact of the day for you) and went with it. insert shrug emoji here. happy late thanksgiving, eat some leftover turkey and enjoy!

Saihara, on his first day, realizes that he hates a lot of things about high school. 

Amami Rantaro is one of them. 

He sits two seats across from Saihara and something about his casual, cool demeanor and the way he keeps the top button of his uniform undone makes his suspicious, makes him thinks that Amami is hiding something. He doesn’t know what it is, but he’s sure that it’s something, and so Saihara pledges to avoid him as much as humanly possible and to keep an eye on him. Besides, cool guys like that were usually total assholes beneath their low laughs and fancy hair. Middle school taught him that well enough. Amami, from his one day of observation, was distrustworthy at best and a potential life-ruiner at worse. 

So, he dislikes Amami. He also dislikes Ouma, who declared himself Supreme Leader and then doused Panta all over Saihara’s head. And he isn’t too fond of Iruma, either, who insisted that his hat made him a pervert. And he dislikes their homeroom teacher because he made Saihara take off the hat and also made a joke, quick but certain, about his lack of eye contact. It made him uncomfortable, made him the center of attention for far too long, and Amami looked at him with something like pity and Saihara wanted to bash his fucking head in, because the pity was always the worst. The pitying looks from social services when his parents had “accidentally” left him at home for months at a time and they had to come collect him because the heat and the water had been shut off, the pitying looks from the school office when they noticed that his uncle was listed as his guardian, the pitying looks from kids who had felt obligated to hang out with him in elementary school because they were good kids and he had no friends, the pitying looks he was so used to that followed him everywhere like ghosts would follow someone more haunted than him. It was the only thing that caused some sort of violence in him, that and attempts at getting him to remove his hat, and by the end of the day, his knuckles turned red and then white with how hard he kept his hands clenched into fists. 

(If Saihara had been able to get a better look at Amami, to look him in the eyes, he would have seen that it was more sympathy than pity, but never mind that. Too little, too late, too much and not enough.)

“So, what do you think of everyone?” Kaede asks as they walk home from school. Kaede became his best friend in middle school, his only friend, really, and they always walked home together. Always. 

“Most of them are okay.” Shuichi tells her. “There are a few who I don’t quite like, but that’s high school, I guess.”

“Hm, let me guess which ones…” She pretends to ponder it for a minute, pressing her finger to her chin and then declaring “Ouma!”

“The Panta Incident certainly didn’t leave me with a good impression.” 

“And...Iruma!”

“Mhmm. Do people _really_ think my hat makes me a pervert?”

“No! She’s just...Iruma. Chabashira went to middle school with her and was telling me about it. She just says stuff like that sometimes.” Kaede shrugs and then thinks again. “And...Momota?”

“No, he seems okay.” Shuichi decides. “A little obnoxious, but not mean. He needs to chill with the hair gel, though. I think he almost stabbed me with his hair earlier.”

“Oh, he _definitely_ needs to chill with the hair gel.” Kaede agrees. “I’m planning on staging an intervention if he doesn’t stop within the month. He sits right behind me and I swear that I can smell it! All the time! And it isn’t even the hair gel that smells nice. It smells like chemicals. A lot of chemicals.”

Shuichi chuckles once, pulls down on his hat (God, he’s so happy to have his hat back), and takes a step towards her to avoid a frantic bicyclist who is going down the sidewalk with no regard for anything but their destination. “Sounds like a good time. Hopefully that’ll end in a success. For the sake of the class.” 

“For the sake of the class.” Kaede agrees. “I think that was everyone dislikable. Well, I guess you could _maybe_ say Harukawa isn’t likeable because I had at least three people say that to me earlier, but I like her! She’s mysterious and cool and probably nice behind all of the edge! I can tell.”

Shuichi thinks about that analysis for a moment, thinks about the knife he saw strapped to Harukawa’s leg, thinks about Harukawa in general, and despite his actual thoughts, he just says “Probably, yeah.”

“I’m thinking that I’m missing someone for you, though.” Kaede says. “Other than the teacher, who I’ll be chewing out tomorrow--”

“No, you won’t.”

“Yes, I will! Anyways, you’re making a face like there’s still someone bugging you.” She deduces, and god dammit, Shuichi really wishes that he didn’t teach her some of the skills his uncle taught him about analyzing people’s facial expressions. Lying to Kaede is useless, so he sighs and gives up. 

“Amami.” He tells her, and when he looks horrified, he explains. “He seemed...too chill. Too casual. Too okay with all of this. Everyone else was at least some degree of nervous, but the fact that he literally doesn’t care makes me distrust him. Besides, guys who are that level of cool always end up being dicks. And he made the face at me earlier.”

Kaede nods once, listening and understanding and then simply disagreeing. “I see your point, but I like him! He was telling me about his little sisters. He has twelve of them, if you can believe it, and he has a bunch of dogs. I don’t think anybody with that many dogs and little sisters can be mean.”

“It was probably just a trick.” Shuichi says. “Guys like that always use sisters and dogs and stuff to make the girl they’re trying to impress like them more, and then they do their normal cheating thing.”

“You’ve been covering too many infidelity cases these days.” Kaede shakes her head at him. “Amami is nice! Trust me on this. Besides, I don’t think he’s interested in me.” She wisely decides to omit that she knows this because she saw him staring at Shuichi with a starry-eyed look that made her want to roll her eyes and laugh at the fact that Shuichi had somehow become a boy magnet in his first day of high school. Poor guy wasn’t going to get much of a break from Shuichi, it seemed, but Kaede figured that it would end up going well in the end.

“...I’ll trust you.”

“Yay!” Kaede cheers, smiling at him in victory, beyond proud of her incredible new achievement. 

“That doesn’t mean I’ll trust him.”

“...Shuichi, you’re _such_ a fucking buzzkill!”

***

By the end of the week, Saihara accepts the fact that Amami is now part of his daily routine. Kaede is friends with everyone, of course, but she’s closer to Amami than most of the class. He becomes part of their study groups, becomes part of their group projects, even sits with them at lunch on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and Saihara can’t help but watch him. 

His ears are what he pays attention to first. He is always looking at Amami from the corner of his eye, from across a row of seats, and so his ears are what he normally sees first. On days that their homeroom teacher is more strict about the uniform, Amami takes out what seems like a miniature jewelry store from his ears and places them in a neat box. Saihara looks at the color of them, notes golds and silvers and ones with little diamonds in them. On days that their teacher is too lazy to care, Amami keeps them in and the light makes them shine in a way that Saihara tries his best to be irritated by. He spends a week only looking at Amami’s ears. 

(Amami notices on the first day that he sits with him and Kaede, that first, fatal Tuesday. He starts talking about them, answering the myriad of questions that Saihara was asking in his mind. He got the first one when he was ten, had gotten at least one a year, and yes, he did have ones that were totally hidden by his uniform, but he refuses to say where. Saihara blushes so furiously at that fact that Kaede is certain he had a fever and Amami laughs. It’s a nice laugh, low and musical and like honey. It makes Saihara want to hit his head off the table.) 

***

Then, his hair. He still has spoken less than a dozen words to Amami, despite Kaede’s insistence and mild disappointment, but he’s still been watching him. Been watching his hair, mostly. It looks soft and thick and it has an interesting, subtle wave to it. What bugs him, though, is the color. It’s a light green, and there’s no way it’s natural, but it’s the best dye job he’s ever seen. And Saihara, Saihara’s dark blue looks clumsy at the roots, looks amatuer, shows bits of his natural black that he dyed because with it, everyone would tell him how much he looked like his father, and oh, how is his father? Has he been back in the country lately? And he doesn’t know, doesn’t care, so he dyes his hair dark blue and people stop asking. That doesn’t mean he wants the blue to be sloppy, though

“What brand of dye do you use?” Saihara asks him nearly three weeks into the school year. It’s the first question he’s ever asked Amami, and his face lights up at the opportunity to answer. 

“Oh, this is my natural color!” Amami tells him, and Saihara raises his eyebrows at him in pure doubt and looks over at Kaede as if to say _I told you he was full of shit_.

“That’s your natural color.” He parrots, doubt making his voice lead heavy and positively deadly, but Amami is undeterred. 

“Yup! I understand your doubt, though. Hold on a second, let me get a picture.” Amami scrolls through his phone for a second and then holds it out to him. On the screen is Amami with two of his younger sister, two girls who look about four, both of whom are too young for hair dye, and with hair the same exact shade of green as Amami’s. Shuichi briefly considers the fact that he could have photoshopped it, but that seems like far too much effort for preparing for just one question. If he had to bet money on it, he would bet that it was real. 

“Huh.” He says. “I guess it is your real color.”

“It is. However, that doesn’t mean I don’t know my fair share about hair dye.” Amami looks at him, looks at him closely, and then moves so that he’s very, very close to Saihara, far beyond what would be considered a polite distance. And then, quiet and certain and echoing in Saihara’s head for what must be centuries, a quick offer. “If you let me take a look at your hair, I can give you a recommendation.”

Saihara considers his options. A recommendation, he decides, wouldn’t hurt, and if he’s doing some insane attempt at hair sabotage, he can double check the brand himself before he buys it. Even though he still doesn’t trust Amami fully, he trusts that Amami knows about things like hair, so he lets him look. 

Amami’s hands are soft in his hair, moving dark blue-black locks every which way. He looks at his roots, at his tips, at the hair around his temples, at every square inch. His hands end up grazing Saihara’s cheeks and Amami is so close, he’s so close and he’s so beautiful, alarmingly beautiful, and he’s looking at him with such consideration that Saihara wants to run away, and Saihara wants to sit there forever, and Saihara _wants_. He’s hyper-aware of his breathing, of the fact that it’s too fast, of the fact that as he sits there longer, it starts to slow and sync up with Amami’s and now he’s calm and not calm, there’s color in his cheeks but he no longer feels on the verge of having a heart attack in the library, and when Amami moves his hands away, Saihara has to sit on his own hands to keep him from dragging Amami’s back. It’s a strange experience, and it works its way into his memory to be picked apart later, but now, all he does is look at the bridge of Amami’s nose and wait for an answer. 

“I’d say Liese.” Amami says, looking at Saihara’s hair again and how nice it looks messed up like that, and he’s almost tempted to not say anything about it, but no, he just runs his hands over Saihara’s hair again and puts it back into order while he talks. “It’s a bit pricy, but it lasts for a long time. In the time that you would have to buy three super cheap boxes, you would only have to buy one bottle of Liese. So in the end, it evens out.”

“Liese.” Saihara says, and he writes it on the edge of his bio notes in neat, careful letters. His handwriting is normally quick and a bit messy, but this isn’t something he wants to mess up. 

“Liese.” Amami confirms, watches his write it out, and smiles at him. It’s a dazzling smile, he knows that it’s his best smile, and this time, it actually reaches his eyes. Shuichi looks at his temple instead of his nose, so he thinks it works. 

Kaede, silent throughout the entire process and trying to focus on her math, can’t help but burst out into laughter then. Amami catches the giggles as well, and Saihara sighs, but it’s lighter than the ones he’s been sighing lately, almost amused. 

(He can still feel Amami’s hands in his hair, if he focuses on it, and he focuses on it. He can’t help but focus on it.)

***

When he feels that he’s uncovered the mysteries of Amami’s hair, Saihara moves onto his hands. They’re interesting, too, worthy of figuring out. By now, it is May and they’ve been in school for a month and Kaede hasn’t stopped staring at Harukawa for a single minute of the past hour. 

Amami turns in his seat, leans across Gonta’s empty desk and whispers to Saihara. “Do you think that if I threw this pencil in Akamatsu’s hair that she would even notice?”

His hands dangle over Gonta’s desk, are hanging right by the edge of his own. The nails have a clear coat of polish over them and he’s wearing a collection of rings that Saihara wants to look at closer. He wants to take each of them and analyze, wants to use them to put together a piece of the puzzle that is Amami Rantaro because despite his casual nature, he hasn’t done anything in the past month to give away any real information about himself, and that makes him even _more_ suspicious and puts Saihara more on guard. He looks at Amami’s hands when he answers. “Not with the way she’s looking at Harukawa. You could detonate a bomb right next to her and I don’t think she would blink.” 

“Me neither. But hey, it’s worth a shot.” And Amami takes a pencil (it’s a nice pencil, newly sharpened, and Saihara almost wants to insist he use the worn down and worthless one on his desk), puts it in his hand, and throws. It’s an elegant throw, and Saihara spends more time looking at the angle of his hands rather than the pencil that’s flying through the air. However, he sees it in his periphery and he sees that Kaede notices it, but she doesn’t turn her eyes away. 

“Jesus.” Saihara says. It’s not an insightful comment, but it’s the only thing he can say to the nature of Kaede’s all-consuming crush on Harukawa, who now sometimes eats lunch with them on Wednesdays. 

“She’s hopeless.” Amami chuckles and shakes his head and his hair falls into his eyes. “Totally hopeless.” 

“Mhmm.” 

And then the teacher calls on Amami and he turns back around and things go back to normal. 

(His hands brush against Saihara’s when he turns back. Amami’s hands are warm, even the rings, but Saihara’s whole body goes cold and he tenses up like he just stuck his finger in an electrical socket. The tension doesn’t leave his body for the rest of the day.)

***

It becomes a bit of a game for him, really. Saihara spends a week on each part of him, and like that, time passes. He does schoolwork, he works at his uncle’s detective agency, he makes cheap pasta for dinner that he eats by himself and eats ice cream with Kaede after school, he reads whatever novels he can get his hands on, and he thinks about Amami Rantaro. 

His elbows, his kneecaps, the things he says and how they line up with what he does. The tip of his nose, his constant disregard for dress code, the way he sometimes looks at Saihara when he thinks that Saihara isn’t looking. It’s a strange look, like he thinks that Saihara is just as worthy of careful analysis as Amami is. It’s all just very strange, but it’s not entirely unpleasant.

He says very little to Amami. He says very little about Amami, not even when Kaede begs him to. He does nothing but think. 

Summer break, he can’t help but think about him more. He uses the distance to try and put pieces together in some order that makes sense, but he comes up with nothing useful, gets a general shape of the puzzle but no real ways to fill it in. There’s nothing except more spaces that he desperately wants to fill because what little information he has makes him curious and makes him dizzy and makes him want to do something stupid and reckless and makes him want to do it now.

The first day back to school, he and Amami get assigned to work together for an English project, and the first thing Amami does is give him his number. 

“Just in case.” He says with a smile. 

Saihara is grateful, but he doesn’t know why. 

(Saihara is pretty sure he doesn’t _want_ to know why.) 

***

The week in October that Saihara spends looking at Amami’s mouth is possibly the most stressful week of his life. He’s covered in schoolwork and detective work and the work of helping Kaede confess her incredibly obvious feelings to Harukawa, who certainly already knows unless she’s somehow the densest person alive. He’s so stressed that he thinks he might fall apart, and Amami Rantaro’s lips are _not helping_.

They are, objectively speaking, very nice lips. Saihara analyzes them without any emotion at first, just noting the shape of them and the way they move and how they fit on his face. They look soft, they’re a nice shade of pink, they may or may not be driving Saihara to madness, they’re possibly the best part of Amami’s objectively fantastic face. There is much to be said on the subject of his lips, much more than he could ever hope so actually say in any coherent manner.

He spends lunch in the library that week. Too much work to do to worry about things like eating. Too much to be done. Amami joins him on Tuesday and doesn’t say anything, just reads through his own schoolwork and sometimes gives Saihara a look of concern. He’s possibly noticed the bags under his eyes and the paleness that covers his whole body and the fact that his cheekbones stick out more than usual, but Saihara doesn’t ask if he’s noticed and Amami doesn’t ask if he’s alright. 

On Wednesday, Saihara tries to imagine what those lips would feel like against his own. He tries not to feel anything about it and fails miserably. 

Thursday is the day of the great confession. Kaede wants to talk to Maki (after talking to her about Kaede and school and life in general for three hours while stuck in the rain on Wednesday, Saihara feels like he can call her Maki now, feels like they’re close enough friends for that) and she wants to do it in the cafeteria by herself, so Amami and Saihara end up in the library again. 

“Are you going to eat anything?” Amami asks halfway through the lunch period. 

“Don’t have the time.” He mutters, flipping through another page of the report about the murder he solved, about the murder he really shouldn’t have solved. The anniversary of it is tomorrow, and he always gets skittish around the anniversary. Skittish and depressed and anxious about everything. Saihara really doesn’t have the time for this, either, but he can’t help but dwell, and that makes the stress worse. 

“You have to make time for stuff like food.” Amami insists, comically sure of himself. 

“There are more important things to do.” Saihara doesn’t lift his head from the paper. 

“Like killing yourself with work?”

“Exactly. Now you’re getting the hang of it. Time eating is time wasted.”

“ _Shuichi._ ”

That gets him to look up. Amami says it again and Saihara looks at how his lips move when he says his name, lets the sound of it wash over him like a wave, lets himself drown in that worried exasperation. Saihara wants to hear him say it again and again, louder than that, Saihara wants to hear nothing but that for the rest of his life and he can’t think about the past or the future or anything but the way Amami says his name. The field of his vision narrows, allows him to focus on one thing that makes his heart do something weird but not entirely awful, and he contemplates how stupid it is that the only thing he needed to hear to snap out of it for a minute was his name. 

“Shuichi, you need to take care of yourself. I’m worried about you.” He says, and he doesn’t look pitying, but he looks actually worried for him. That’s a new look. 

“You don’t have to worry about me. I’m fine.” He lies and it sounds weak to his own ears, but he does it anyways. 

“That’s not going to stop me.” Amami passes him an apple, places it right in Saihara’s hand. He thinks about it for a minute, looks at the apple and then looks at Amami and then looks back at his papers, and he takes a bite. 

(That night is the first night in two weeks he doesn’t dream of vengeful eyes burning into his. That night, he dreams of a pair of lips that are part of someone he calls Rantaro.)

***

More time passes. Saihara feels some of his guard dropping, forces himself to still refer to Rantaro as Amami, forces himself to still be suspicious, but Rantaro is working his way in, wearing away at defenses without even trying. When Kaede spends her Thursday lunches with Maki, he still stays with Saihara, and they actually manage to keep a thread of conversation that isn’t entirely hostile. He’s good with words, Saihara discovers. That makes him trust Rantaro a bit less, but he makes up for it by sticking with the words that come out of his mouth. 

As October bleeds into November, Saihara finds out a few things that make him tick. Being called a womanizer, for one. He had actually had gotten mad at Saihara for the unfortunate insinuation, and after feeling bad for getting him genuinely upset for about a second, Saihara realized that it was sort of sexy when Rantaro looked at him with that much passion. He adds both of those observations to his running lists. 

He also gets mad at Ouma exactly once, when he takes Saihara’s notebook and pitches it from the third story window. Saihara had just rolled his eyes at Ouma and said “I’ll get it later,” but Rantaro was having exactly none of it. He didn’t hear what was said to Ouma, but he saw the anger behind that simple smile and could hear the softly threatening tone, and the notebook was returned to him within the half hour. 

Saihara also discovers that Rantaro really likes complimenting him. Something about it amuses him. Saihara figures it’s because he never knows how to react. He can’t tell if Rantaro actually means what he says about Saihara being smart and observant and funny (Funny? When had anyone ever found him funny?), and so each one is regarded skeptically, run through his internal alarm system and checked thoroughly before being possibly accepted, but he still blushes at each one, blushes and hopes. Rantaro makes less sense to him by the day, and Saihara thinks the frustration of it might actually kill him before the end of the semester. 

“Do you still hate Rantaro?” Kaede asks him in the beginning of November. 

“I have absolutely no idea.” He admits. He’s still untrustworthy, still frustratingly vague and possibly less trusting than Saihara himself, still a mystery that feels unsolvable, but something drags him towards Rantaro. It’s sometimes gentle, sometimes an angry, bright red, sometimes something like the reflection of an orange moon on the water, but it doesn’t ever relent or allow him any peace. Saihara knows little about romance, but he rules out the possibility of it being a crush because this is nothing like he’s been told romance is like. Romance is supposed to be softer than this, less agonizing, less heady, less confusing than whatever Rantaro stirs in him. It’s supposed to make some sense. This, this is senseless. This is stupid. This is not romantic at all. 

“That’s progress.” Kaede says. 

(Saihara knows he should disagree, that at least the hatred was certain and so thus this is moving backwards, but he doesn’t. This is progress, progress towards something, but hell if he knows what.)

***

At the end of November, Miu throws a birthday party, and Saihara is fairly certain that every person he’s ever met in his life is there. Miu’s house is huge, her parents are gone, alcohol is everywhere and some shitty trap beat is shaking the windows and blowing out his eardrums. Saihara wishes that he didn’t come and he doesn’t know who or what he’s looking for, but he wanders around anyways. 

He ends up on the couch with Maki, who’s drinking something from a flask that he doesn’t feel comfortable putting a name to. “Amami’s been looking for you for the past hour.” She says after a few minutes where Saihara just breathes and enjoys finding a bit of peace. 

“Did he say why?” 

“It’s Amami. Of course he didn’t.” Maki rolls her eyes and passes him the flask. Saihara pretends to take a sip. He needs all of his wits about him for this. 

“I’m honestly not surprised.” He says. “I’d be more shocked if he actually did.”

“Me too. But God, he was being annoying about it. ‘Are you sure you haven’t seen Shuichi?’ Yes, I’m pretty fucking sure I would have seen you if you were there, you’re the only person I know who wears a hat indoors.” She scoffs, looking around for an invisible Amami to scold for asking her in the first place. 

“Was he drunk?”

“Nope. Sober as a stone.”

“And he said nothing about why he wanted to see me.”

“Absolutely nothing.”

“And you don’t have any ideas?”

“A few, but they’re all relatively useless.” 

“Did you see what way he went?”

Maki raises her eyebrows at him, clearly amused by this development in her stoic, unamused way. “Upstairs.”

“Please forget we ever had this conversation.”And with that, Saihara heads towards the stairs. He isn’t sure what he’s going to do or what he wants, but he feels certain that he’ll implode it he doesn’t make some sort of move. He’s sick of sitting and waiting for an answer that doesn’t come. Answers, he remembers his uncle saying once, come to those who chase them down and beat the shit out of them if necessary. 

From there, it’s a maze of endlessly similar rooms and smoke. He sees a lot of things (sees too many things, in his opinion), but none of them are Rantaro until he’s about to head down the stairs again and he sees him talking to Maki for the third time that night. He can see Maki rolling her eyes from there and Rantaro turns around and sees him. He waves, his face cheerful and giving away nothing, and heads upstairs. Saihara drags him into the first empty room he sees and shuts the door behind them. 

“What do you want?” He asks, looking Rantaro in the eyes for once in his life and _oh, he has really nice eyes and his lashes are amazing and--_

“Nothing. I just wanted to see you.” Rantaro grins at him like it’s the simplest thing in the world. Another piece of the incomplete and constantly shifting puzzle that is Amami Rantaro snaps into place, and Saihara really can’t stand this anymore, he really can’t, so he reaches up and pulls Rantaro down and kisses him. 

It’s not what first kisses are supposed to be like. There’s nothing soft and gentle and sweet about this. The setting is dismal, a dusty guestroom at the houseparty of someone he doesn’t even know that well, and the mood music they’re stuck with is whatever Iruma loaded onto her playlist at the beginning of the party. There were no loving words exchanged before the kiss, no dramatic confessions, nothing like that. It was a few quick words and than _this_ , this thing that is clumsy and desperate and mostly teeth. Saihara hasn’t so much as held hands with someone before, let alone done this, kissed someone like it means something, because it does, it means something, even if Saihara can’t name exactly what that something is.

Rantaro is a good kisser, or at least very good at pretending to be a good kisser. He puts his hands around Saihara’s waist, pulls him close, lets Saihara readjust his grip so that his hands are laced in Rantaro’s hair and his hair is softer than he ever could have dreamed back in April. Saihara is a quick study, figures out fairly easily how to move his mouth so that they don’t hit their noses against each other. His hat ends up on the floor, his shirt soon thereafter, he’s on the bed and stradling Rantaro’s legs, and Rantaro, Rantaro is _everywhere_. Rantaro’s hands over the vertebrae of his spine, Rantaro’s lip on his lips, his jaw, his neck, Rantaro’s voice in his ear, Rantaro is all he can see and all he can feel and all he wants to see and all he wants to feel. 

They kiss themselves exhausted, kiss for what feels like an eternity but isn’t actually much more than half an hour, give or take a few minutes on either side. They kiss until their lips are red and swollen and Saihara’s neck is covered in hickeys and there’s very few inches of skin that have gone untouched. Rantaro wraps an arm around him and they end up kicking off their shoes and laying on the bed. Saihara offers no explanation for his actions, and Rantaro does not ask. He already knows, has been fighting the same curious beast for months, and he isn’t going to force Saihara to say what’s unsayable. 

What he does say is stupid and somewhat meaningless, technically speaking. He simply pokes at the hickeys on Saihara’s neck and says “You know, I don’t think your uniform is going to cover that.” 

Saihara buries his head into Rantaro’s chest and groans, his face warm enough that Rantaro can feel the blush without having to see it. “Shut _up_.”

(Romance, Saihara thinks, the romance he’s heard about and read about and dreamed about distantly and hopelessly, is certainly dead. Somehow, Saihara’s pleased by that fact. Whatever this is feels much, much better.)

**Author's Note:**

> it's called being gay for a pretty avacado saihara, smh. 
> 
> (also, please leave a comment letting me know how you feel, and thanks for reading!)


End file.
